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The Woven Tale Press
Vol.III #11
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Sandra Tyler Author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and After Lydia, both published by Harcourt Brace; awarded BA from Amherst College and MFA in Writing from Columbia University; professor of creative writing on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at Columbia University, (NY), Wesleyan University (CT), and Manhattanvill College, (NY); served as assistant editor at Ploughshares and The Paris Review literary magazines, and production freelancer for Glamour, Self, and Vogue magazines; freelance editor; Stony Brook University’s national annual fiction contest judge; a 2013 BlogHer.com Voices of the Year. www.awriterweavesatale.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Michael Dickel, Ph.D. A poet, fiction writer, essayist, photographer and digital artist, Dr. Dickel holds degrees in psychology, creative writing, and English literature. He has taught college, university writing and literature courses for nearly 25 years; served as the director of the Student Writing Center at the University of Minnesota and the Macalester Academic Excellence Center at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN). He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010). His work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art books, and online for over 20 years, including in:THIS Literary Magazine, Eclectic Flash, Cartier Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Sketchbook, Emerging Visions Visionary Art eZine, and Poetry Midwest. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour. www.michaeldickel.info
ARTS EDITORS: Seth Apter Mixed-media artist, instructor, author and designer. His artwork has been widely exhibited, and represented in numerous books, independent zines, and national magazines. He is the voice behind The Pulse, a series of international, collaborative projects, the basis of his two books The Pulse of Mixed Media: Secrets and Passions of 100 Artists Revealed and The Mixed-Media Artist: Art Tips, Tricks, Secrets and Dreams From Over 40 Amazing Artists, both published by North Light Books. He is the artist behind two workshop DVDs: Easy Mixed Media Surface Techniques and Easy Mixed Media Techniques for the Art Journal. www.sethapter.com Donald Kolberg Sculptor, painter, art marketer and writer. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the U.S. in museums and galleries with his current representation at the Parker Art Gallery in St. Simons, Ga. He has been featured in an NBC short documentary and numerous print and zine publications. He is founder of ArtCore an international newsletter, and continues to be active in art groups presenting classes on marketing and art techniques including workshops on creating Strappo’s, a dry transfer acrylic monotype. A graduate of California State University, Los Angeles, his master work was continued at Otis Art Institute. Additionally he produced Periscope Up an independent television production for a Pennsylvania PBS station. His artwork has been included in the publication ‘Sculpture and Design with Recycled Glass’. Additional artwork and information can be viewed at www.DonaldKolberg.com PHOTOGRAPHY EDITORS: Susan Tuttle Award-winning iPhoneographer and DSLR photographer. She is the author of three instruction-based books (published in the US and abroad by F+W Media, North Light Books) on digital art with Photoshop, mobile photography and DSLR photography, and mixed-media art. Her fourth book, Art of Everyday Photography: Move Toward Manual and Make Creative Photos (about DSLR photography and mobile photography) was recently released by North Light Books and has been a best-seller in its category on Amazon. She is currently the Technical Advisor for Somerset Digital Studio Magazine. www.susantuttlephotography.com Charlotte Thompson Conceptual photographer and owner of Digital Art Transparency Overlays. Besides designing book covers, her works are in individual collections both in the U.S. and abroad, including Denmark, Sweden, Australia, and Korea. She has shown her photography at Photo Contemporary, OPF Gallery One, Raleigh Studios, and in a Hollywood exhibitions. www.opfgalleryone.com/artists/charlotte-thompson LITERARY EDITOR: Jo Ely Graduate of Oxford University with a degree in English; author of Festivals and Art for Everyone published by Collins and Longman; reviewer for the Empathy Library founded by writer and cultural historian Roman Krznaric, and curated by poet Sophia Blackwell; shortlisted for the Fish International Short Story competition. Her first novel, Stone Seeds, will be published by Urbane Publications, spring 2016. jo-ely.co.uk
Woven Tale Publishing Š copyright 2015 Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited, except by permission of the publisher.
ISSN: 2333-2387
Editor’s Note: The Woven Tale Press is a monthly culling of the creative Web, exhibiting the artful and innovative. Enjoy here an eclectic mix of the literary, visual arts, photography, humorous, and offbeat. The Woven Tale Press mission is to grow Web traffic to noteworthy writers and artists–contributors are credited with interactive Urls back to their sites. Click on a name in the bar at the top of the page to learn more about a contributor. To submit or become a Press member, go to: thewoventalepress.net
Contents Anders, Patricia 9 Brant, William B. 29 Darke, Kelly 37 Dickel, Michael 35 Kolberg, Donald 53 Godden, Salena 41 Macko, Dusan 61 Meadows, Claire 27 Philp, Lawrence 17 Roman, Kathy Blankley
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Skinner, Richard 7 Stone, Mike 51 Szirtes, George 19 Tabor-Miolla, Francesca 21 Waugh, Annemarie 45
Kathy Blankley Roman
“O
il and cold wax
is a medium I use in a process of layering and scraping. Because of the unique properties of the oil paint mixed with beeswax and how it handles, my colors and compositions are somewhat different from my acrylic paintings.”
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Being There oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel 10” x 10”
Troika oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel 14” x 11”
“B
ecause of the longer drying time of this medium, removal – scraping, dissolving – of the paint, at different stages of drying, allows for many different effects and a more complex surface history.“
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Lantern Seller oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel 14” x 11”
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Bistro oil and cold wax medium on cradled wood panel 10” x 10”
Winter Morning oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel 10” x 10”
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Stand oil, cold wax and dry pigments on cradled hardboard panel 12” x 12”
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Red Moon oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel 10” x 10”
“M
y paintings are process driven and become a kind of meditation that allows me to tap into my connection to the world around me. Words, rhythms, images, sounds – experiences that evoke a visceral response in me become the source, the reservoir that I draw from when I paint. Starting with random marks and responding to them intuitively, my paintings are built up in layers that go through many changes, like thoughts morphing across the surface, developing depth, motion and a sense of history. A painting is not complete until I sense in it a cetain life or spirit.”
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Richard Skinner
A Waltz They arrive in the white city after months of travel, they’ve heard it is a place far from decisions. His daughter is seeing snow for the first time— she hasn’t said a word all day. He thinks about consequences. Randomness. He sees the city as a knot of roads, his life written on her white mind.
Lupus Street The day after she left him, he lay on his bed. He watched the ceiling and roused himself only when the sun had set. Two weeks later, he studied her brush all morning, pulling out the hairs. Then he washed her sock. Four months after, he left his room and smashed every window in the block.
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“Waltz” and “Lupus” are taken from The Light User Scheme (Smokestack, 2013).
Cumbria Lumen Light seeps fast over the dun fells like a great curtain of yellow opening to reveal the sky, the fields. A vast migraine, coming forwards, stuns and sweeps through us like a broad sword, leaves us as topheavy aerials, quivering, looking for the arc au ciel far behind in summer rain.
Found There is a white sunrise. We are dreaming of a shape within a blur and the days are not full enough. They come, they wake us, and there I found myself more truly and more strange. (Lotte Kramer, Ian Hamilton, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens)
Skinner’s poems have appeared in numerous publications and been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. His debut collection, The Light User Scheme, was published by Smokestack in 2013. His new pamphlet is Terrace (Smokestack, 2015). He is also the editor of two poetry anthologies: #1PoetryAnthology (Vanguard Editions, 2014) and The Ecchoing Green: Poems Inspired by William Blake(The Big Blake Project, 2015). He is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. He also runs Vanguard Readings and its publishing arm Vanguard Editions.
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Patricia Anders
“I
begin each day with a mission of creation. I’m pas-
sionate about living the art full life. More and more this includes balance, appreciation for nature, living green bit by bit, home grown, homemade, and handmade.”
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Branches mixed media
Messenger mixed media
all dolls: between five and ten inches in height
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“I
a m environmentally conscientious. I use all recycled materials and found objects. I scrounge for armatures at flea markets, yard sales and thrift stores. I buy broken, damaged, deserted and no longer wanted dolls that would end up in the landfills. I use paper mache, paper pulp, paper clay, pattern paper and tissue paper to reshape and reinvent the figures and faces. The notion of turning junk into fine works of art is both challenging and appealing to me.�
Raw mixed media
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Seeing Hands mixed media
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Read My Face mixed media
Wood Nymph mixed media
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Winged mixed media
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Sparks Will Fly, Sparky mixed media
Glorious Afterlife mixed media
Day of the Dead mixed media
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Lawrence Philp
Untitled from the Summer/Garage/Music series acrylic, latex enamel paint, relief elements on canvas 11 x 14” x .50”
Untitled from the Summer/Garage/Music series acrylic, latex enamel paint, relief elements on canvas 12” x12” x .25”
“I
l isten to music
when I am painting, and the music I listen to varies from Mozart to Louis Armstrong, Lester Bowie and Albert Ayler. I listen to New York Latin jazz, salsa, b omba, plena, Son Montuno Guaguanco, songo and Carl Orff. Painting for me can be said to be a polyrhythmic, poly-color intense and shape- inspired experience (necessity).”
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Untitled from the Summer/Garage/Music series acrylic, latex enamel paint, relief elements on canvas 11” x 14” x .50”
Untitled from the Summer/Garage/Music series acrylic, latex enamel paint, relief elements on canvas 8” x 10” x .50”
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George Szirtes
In Defence of Cliche He talked in clichés because he could at least talk when talking was hard. He talked of his loss, of his ‘angel’, his ‘sunshine’ ‘the light of his life’. Clichés were his tongue and his heart, his whole being in that wild moment. The articulate could choose their words carefully and make distinctions but for him there were no suitable distinctions. Nothing was distinct except the difference between loss and its numbness which was not language. So he spoke clichés he had learned without learning, just as one learns pain of which there’s plenty that never does stop talking, rocking to and fro as the voiceless do and the child, being instinct with its wordlessness, a silent cliché, a gentleness of dead words in search of the dead.
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On Angels In derelict streets full of blind houses the eyes are shattered windows. When the blind windows open their eyes they will see. Their gods will listen.
Minimalist The minimal is the intense, says one whose life has been chopped small and rarely done, a little steak, a little blood, a gun. The minimal is terrible. The parts you amputated vanish: nothing charts their painful absence. Nothing stops or starts. Eliminating waste, the minimal is what remains. You call it seminal, but it is bare. Excess is criminal. So this is tiny. Life, alas, is short. You don’t need a cast of thousands for support. Cut down. Relax. It’s blood. Enjoy the sport.
Here’s the high gable. Here come the angels, all eyes and ears and trumpets. The blind shall open their eyes and the dumb shall speak, proclaim the trumpets. Angels are fallen. Look at the vacant spaces. See, they are massing. Out of the bare street emerges the thin angel they’ve been harbouring. The enormous wing of one absconding angel overshadows them. Here is where we live, answer the streets, and the walls are our one defence. Nor is there an hour without angels. They become what the street breathes out. Here is where we live: in the breathing of the street, among the trumpets.
Szirtes is the author of over twenty books of poetry, his most recent, Notes on the Inner Circle (Eyewear) and (Arc) with Carol Watts
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Francesca Tabor-Miolla
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When Before Became After mixed media 18” x 36”
Silly Ole Proverbial Box mixed media 20” x 20”
An Illusive Quest mixed media 20” x 20”
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Awwwwwkward Moment mixed media 20” x 20”
“I
work intuitively,
however, in the far reaches of my mind are the fundamentals that I worked thirty years to understand, and then, I had to learn to let go…I use it all, collage, paper, junque, found objects, fiber, textiles, glass, dirt, vintage stuff, along with whatever else strikes my fancy. If I can get it to stick to a substrate, then it’s mine!”
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Hiding in Plain Sight mixed media 24” x 36”
Somewhere in the Equation mixed media 20” x 20”
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Stand Beside Me mixed media 20” x 40”
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“I
always begin with acrylic paint, then I begin working through an additive and subtractive process, incorporating and building, most often adding/using found objects, fiber, text, rust, symbolism, various metals and sometimes collage, while simultaneously laying and changing the predominant colors. As a painter, I continuously struggle to create order and balance out of chaos.� 26
Claire Meadows
Fort For in each other Fragility fails to impact That part of us that Previously And habitually Destroys. My head On your shoulder My hand in yours Speaks of sin And safety. Of death And love. Of need And sacrifice. In each moment. You’re My father. My lover. My brother. My saint. The fires I dance Through are Nothing compared to Those I would.
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Beyond All is extraneous Noise but you.
But by night I’ll dance To your pain until it’s
All is scraping around The edges..falling
Nothing at all. My mouth Stopped with the taste
In line to a beat of A half-stopped heart
Of you…my eyes Seeing nothing but
A half-stopped world In which my eyes
Your fear. And I’ll Hold you. Long after
Are blinkered to Sincerity..to visceral
The anger dies. And I watch you by
Need. But you
Candlelight. Sinking Beyond dreams.
Turn it on a pin. You are to my blood Sanctuary. I can direct The basest reasons to Your voice..to your Care. Close your eyes And pull me towards It. We can find reasons Later. You hurt But I’ll memorise each Kink like a fingerprint So by day we fall into step
Meadows is Founder and Editor in Chief of After Nyne magazine http://www.afternyne.com.
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William B. Brant
In Your Face oil on canvas 60” x 51”
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Greening oil on canvas 64” x 56”
W
hile Brant is primarily an oil painter
and colorist, his work has evolved through abstract expressionism to explorations of perspective and genre, to commentaries on modern perplexities. If you’re looking for attributes that define his work, try “a sometimes whimsical and provocative colorist.”
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In Your Face oil on canvas II 60” x 51”
“M
y work is becoming more and more about how few elements it takes to make a good painting. I wish to minimize the subject matter to emphasize the power of space and color.”
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More Chairs in the Sunroom oil on canvas 48” x 66”
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Pond oil on canvas 40” x 32”
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Red Walls oil on canvas 50” x 43”
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Michael Dickel
Three One lies restless in the small hours, the dead of night— three in the morning and worried about medical motorcycles whizzing passed a wife on her way home from work this evening— distressed about tear gas and bullets fired into Gazans at the border fence West Bank rioters— hounded by knives shootings the sound of fighter jets crackling the sky in two. Don’t tell one how dark the eyes just before sunrise. Don’t tell one how to escape here or to watch Seinfeld and order pizza. Pay attention. This is our world. Now. One weighed down by a century dead while demonstrating for peace— trying to rise up and see hope that we want it—disheartened by chants of kill the Arabs kill the Jews college campuses dimmed to ghastly— hearing two bomb blasts gunfire last gasps school girls kidnapped one pregnant mother and her child buried in rubble—three dead. Don’t tell one to light two eyes and shine like three dawns. Don’t tell one how to find a job or exercise twice as much or to open three beers. Pay attention. This is our World. War. One. Two. Three.
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Cost of Yellow I know there’s a war going on, but yellow flowers cover trees in the parking lot as I pull in. True, missiles shatter lives while destroying buildings, but fallen petals cover the tarmac with a fairy-yellow glow. Yes, sirens send us underground while rocket’s dread flares, and these, too, crash stupendously, but the sea air waves a soft, humid blanket spread out by soothing breezes. So easily I forget the price of wind, the cost of yellow; so hard to forget the lone cry of a carrion crow perched high in the tree with sharp eyes turned toward the horizon.
art by the author
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Kelly Darke
K
elly Darke, an art therapist
as well as a professional artist, is currently focusing on fiber art and consistently challenging herself through this chosen medium. Materials for these works incorporate both the new and recycled –the layering of old and new–past and present. They are created using a combination of machine stitching and hand embroidery, then mounted in a custom-made shadow box.
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Thread Lace 13 mixed media 12” x 12” x 1.5”
Thread Lace 3 - Red mixed media 8” x 8” x 1”
Thread Lace 2 mixed media 8” x 8” x 1”
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Thread Lace 10 mixed media 12” x 12” x 1.5”
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Thread Lace 12 mixed media 12” x 12” x 1.5”
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Salena Godden
Swan We live on a river in the country, we talk gently and listen easy, we lost our smoky bark and city hiss. You’ll play me the guitar, whilst I knead dough. I make enough bread to feed the ten sons we never made time to have. You get under my feet when I ask you to whisk the milk. Stir the gravy. Mind the oven. We never agree about the temperature, maps and train time tables. You hold the pegs whilst I hang the washing, on the line hung between low-hanging crab-apple trees. Our ramshackle garden is overgrown and there are spiders in the lavender. The radio plays the shipping forecast. It’s getting cold. Cold enough to snow. No. Not yet. A skein of geese flock overhead, but you and me, we never migrated apart. Together we become weathered and soft as old cotton and as yellow as warm butter. We keep chickens and ducks that rarely lay eggs, an obnoxious mallard nests like royalty in an armchair in the parlour. Of course we brew our own beer and we grow grass and tomatoes in the conservatory. Laughter. Yes, we still laugh, the lines are etched around our failing eyes. and play cards and drink rum and dare each other to skinny-dip in the lake by the weeping willow when the moon is high. Books are precariously balanced on slanting shelves and guitars are in varying states of loving repair. Boxes of dusty poetry and newspaper cuttings clutter the stairs. And the piano has a few keys missing, like teeth and the scissors and your spectacles – they are on your head, you nincompoop!
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We’ve collected empty Marmite jars for no reason, no reason at all. We get tired, we go to bed, have sex in the afternoon. Snow flutters like feathers past the frosty winter windows. Face to face, we lie on the cool side of the pillow, wrapped in each other’s arms like two monkeys. My fingers play with the silver hair at your temples, you stroke my face and I breathe slowly. Jigsaw pieces. We always did fit nicely. You call me in my dreams at night. I’ve felt your plush wings spread wide, enveloping me.
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The Saturday Shift I’m trying to read a Jonathan Franzen article, his opinion of culture and despair. Bottom line is, he says, we just don’t read enough. There are two old ladies in this afternoon with frazzled, dried-apricot hair. They’re ordering double vodkas, with homeopathic splashes of lemonade. I’m having a glass of red, and chain smoking. It’s a warm September afternoon but I bet old Reg would have wanted that fire burning brightly. He’d insist on more coal and more shush, raising his long bony finger to his thin grey lips blue with wine and kissing death. Reg used to have pints of light and bitter, but after that visit to the doctor’s, large gin and tonics with plenty of ice. They can keep things on ice, you know, until they find a cure… Kate says we are selling death, tobacco and booze, she says, we’re as bad as any crack dealer, what’s the difference, she says, we all do it to ourselves, don’t we? The funeral on Friday, sausage rolls on a plate, the regulars wear suits and ties, us girls behind the bar in black and we all raise a glass, we served him his last drinks, because you cannot catch last orders transdermally, and if you only had so much time
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would you stay at home alone with a takeaway in front of the telly? Me neither. He was in the pub every day; we watched his sallow deterioration. He was swollen-bellied and cold all summer, a stale perfume of decay, like a snappy threadbare dog. But we were used to him, we loved him in our way, and the fireplace is empty and strange without him standing there now. That glass of red went down well, the old ladies buy me another, I light a fag, I do it to myself but I don’t bother to finish the Jonathan Franzen article. Life is too short and even I know we should all read more.
Salena Godden is a regular guest poet on various BBC shows, including Woman’s Hour, From Fact To Fiction, The Verb, Saturday Live and Loose Ends. She is currently poet-in-residence for Click Radio on BBC World Service. Both these poems are taken from her collection Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994-2014.
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Annemarie Waugh
All of a Flutter mixed media on paper 9� x 12�
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T
he abs
are often me acrylics, hardw these three mediums toge appear and reappear thro
Diamonds are Forever acrylic, crayons, pencil and marker on paper 30” x 22”
Girl with Basket and Foxglove acrylic, crayon and pencil on paper 9” x 12”
stract and figurative
erged in Waugh’s paintings. Her works are a mix of ware industrial paints and pencil. It is as if by bringing ether, she echoes the often unrelated themes that can ough the different layers of her works.
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Spring Notes acrylic, industrial paint and pencil on paper 9� x 12�
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Donate a Tree, Northern Catalpa acrylic, pencil and markers on paper 26� x 20�
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Pain and Pleasure acrylic and pencil on canvas 72” x 48”
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The Foxglove and the Dragonfly acrylic and pencil on paper 8� x 8�
W
augh physically begins each painting from an abstract mark. At the same time, her abstract paintings are often triggered by a narrative. She infuses each painting with her own personal moments, allowing her memories and associations to resurface through the different layers, revealing every day references to her own history, and nostalgic imagery of her childhood.
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Mike Stone
A Tale of Two Cities Raanana, October 9, 2015
It was the blessed of cities It was the cursed of cities, A city located halfway between heaven and earth And a city halfway between earth and hell, A city where stones are cool and soft From evening breezes and countless feet A city where stones are hot with blood And sharp with crashing down on heads, A city purchased with the blood of David From Jebusites for more than it was worth, A city worth more today than the blood of all our children, One city’s Mount Moriah where Isaac was bound for sacrifice Another’s Al-Masjid al-Aqsa where Mohammed ascended, A city protected by youthful soldiers And a city defiled by youthful soldiers, Jerusalem the capital of Israel And al-Quds the capital of Palestine But in truth the capital of no earthly nation, A city twice destroyed A city indestructible, A city about which everything said is true And one about which nothing said is true.
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Sonoma Fog Raanana, June 10, 2015
You find yourself between night and morning, Can’t sleep anymore. You boil the coffee And hold the steaming mug with both hands As you stand on the old wood porch Watching the grey fog roll down the mountain Toward you like an avalanche of ghostly silence, Insistent like an unrepentant memory of childhood, But gentle, timorous, As it nuzzles against you. It moves into the house Almost consciously through every room, Sniffing the bed, Looking for her. You want to tell it she’s not here But the fog swallows your words and, Anyway there is no one to hear them.
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Donald Kolberg
“P
attern Women
explores expressions of the body and the human condition. It is a series of my mixed-media paintings of women where I use sewing pattern templates as the underlying support on watercolor paper and constructed boxes. In these works I bring a living quality to flat inanimate patterns, by turning the original shapes into organic forms without the use of actual human figures. I create a literal transformation in which a sewing pattern for a sleeve becomes a leg; a leg becomes a torso, the pattern of a pocket becomes a breast and other template forms are transfigured into a variety of exploited images. My placement of the original templates, along with the use of textural painting, augments the works spatial qualities. I paint the surface with multiple layers of transparent and opaque acrylic washes. This allows original sewing instructions to still be visible throughout the art work, providing a contradiction, a tension, between the directive of the printed instructions and the reality of the painted images.�
Pa
on w
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attern Woman 7 mixed media watercolor paper 24� x 18�
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Pattern Woman 3 mixed media on watercolor paper 30” x 22”
Pattern Woman VF mixed media on watercolor paper 24” x 18”
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Pattern Woman 8 mixed media on watercolor paper 24” 18”
Pattern Woman 2 mixed miedia on watercolor paper 30” x 22”
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T
hese works of art explore how texture can become an integral part of creating a sense and feel of an abstract landscape.
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Morning Light oil and enamel spray on canvas 36” x 48”
Fire oil and enamel spray on canvas 24” x 48”
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Harbor oil wash and spray enamel on canvas 12” x 24”
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Dusan Macko
Secrets of the Subconscious photograph
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Toy Story photograph
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You Want–You Get photograph
Fullness photograph
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I Am Waiting For You photograph
16 photograph
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Industrial Abstract photograph
Playing the Rose photograph
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Back to the Green Future photograph
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winner of creative edit category in 1x Photo Awards
In the Evening the Room photograph
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